After fighting off swarming plagues of water beetles with DARPA’s new “electric wands” your hosts investigate the latest attempts to communicate with Shadow People. We then don our adventurer’s hats and re-visit…

And then there is L-Tryptophan. I use it. It’s great if you don’t use it too often. But i guess if you want to compensate a shitty lifestyle nothing should be too good if you use it often ; )

mannyramirez

Rouge nations hacking satellites? Smashing them into important navigation and Govermental ones? Oh I can hear a movie screenplay being keyed in. Clickty Clickty Click…and a phrase that goes: For Queen and Country, James?

http://www.facebook.com/Hits.you.with.a.spade Lukas Threlfall

Yay, Dover Demon got a mention, love that thing

Ryanne

Hello Aaron and Ben! Would it be possible for you guys to post some video footage of your Paradigm Symposium East Coast meet-ups for all of us adoring fans who can’t make it? Even if it was just a minute or two, it would soooo cool to kind of meet you. Just putting the idea out there X’s and O’s -Ryanne

http://dailygrail.com/ Red Pill Junkie

Well, crap!

Pirvonen

Re: Space junk.

Those pictures of a huge cloud of dots almost cheek to cheek all around the Earth are somewhat misleading. A single pixel in most of those images are tens of kilometers in size, whereas a regular satellite is perhaps a few meters long, a a bit more for some with really big solar panels. Try to make each of those space junk dots to scale and the situation does not look quite as horrible. Besides, something like 3/4 of those objects are small, tens of centimeters in size — a screwdriver, an inspection panel…

As you rightly note, however, size of an object is not the most dangerous thing. The velocities involved make most collisions rather energetic.

The size does, in turn, make the harpooning approach problematic. You certainly can harpoon that dustbin or filing cabinet. But given how almost all of the objects are debris, such as a socket wrench or a piece of aluminium plate, the cost-effectiveness of a large satellite hunting down those tiny vermin with questionable efficiency is very, very doubtful.

Besides, already a decade or more ago there was a proposal of clearing some of that junk with trawling nets. This will be much more effective against small-sized objects. Nothing came of that, either.

Just put more personnel on the bridge of the ship and train them in terrestrial and celestial navigation. Dependent on vulnerable satellite navigation no more, and a significant number of job openings moreover.